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10:02 PM: A nut by any other name...
In my idiolect, "almond" was always pronounced /aminned/, rhyming with "Hammond." That is, the "a" had the vowel sound found in "man," "plan," and "Spam," and the "l" was silent.
This is the way I pronounced "almond," and I consider it to be the normative pronunciation of "almond," for the simple reason that my mother pronounces it that way. If it's good enough for my mother, it ought to be good enough for anybody. And this state of affairs was just fine as long as I never had much call to use the word in talking to others.
Then, almost six years ago, I was introduced to my favorite mixed drink, the Toasted Almond. (Amaretto + Kahlua + either milk, cream, or Bailey's; essentially a White Russian with amaretto and no vodka. [Add vodka, and you get a Roasted Toasted Almond. (Seriously. It helps to keep in mind that the people who name these things tend to be toasted themselves.)]) It turns out that even in the best of circumstances, asking for a /tohstid aminned/ will get you a blank stare. Add a harried bartender and a noisy bar, and there really isn't any change of getting your drink unless you sigh inwardly and amend your order to a /tohstid ahlminned/. Which is what I've done.
I discovered last week, when considering a box of almond cookies that were on sale at the supermarket, that I now use the /ahlminned/ pronunciation in the privacy of my own head. I don't have any deep philosophical point to make here, but I find this disconcerting.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
11:30 PM: Not the best argument for virtual worlds
Oh, Sis. You think Facebook games are a massive timesuck? Try Second Life.
Better yet, don't.
Second Life is a virtual world. Unlike, say, World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, there are no goals, except for those you set for yourself. There are no points. Like real life, or "First Life," it is what you make of it.
The major difference is that, unlike First Life, the sky is the limit. If you can imagine it, you can do it. In fact, if you can imagine it, somebody probably has done it. Want to tour a walk-through model of the Serenity spacecraft from Firefly? Multiple copies exist in-world. Would you rather walk along a quiet beach and watch the sun's light glisten off the waves? Plenty of options for that. Would you like to inhabit the body of a giant robot and dance the night away? Not a problem.
Some people like building things there, some people like running events there, some people like making clothes there, and some people like getting dressed up in clothes other people have made to attend events in places built by still other people. There's room for all sorts. You can be as social as you want. You can use all the skills and creativity you have, or just enjoy those of others. And it's hard to describe how immersive an experience it is... perhaps the one thing Second Life does best is that it conveys a sense of real presence. Your avatar feels like you, and you feel like you're walking around areas that actually exist.
Why am I there? There are any number of good reasons one might have for that, but in my case it comes down to escapism. Which is particularly alluring on two counts.
The first count is that my First Life sucks. Less so right at this moment; I actually have employment for a change, which ought to last me the rest of this month. For most of this year, I didn't. From January through August, I was largely holed up in my apartment, sending resumes spinning into the void. To say it was demoralizing would be something of an understatement. Even now, I'm back to being holed up in my apartment. My social life consists almost entirely of hanging out with My Sister the Graphic Designer on Thursdays. (Mind you, I'm glad I have that or I'd be totally off the rails by this point.)
The second count is that in Second Life, I get to be a girl. (This may be a subset of "my First Life sucks," but it seems significant enough to single out.)
As escapism goes, Second Life is hard to beat. You can be and do whatever you can only wish you could do in your First Life... and then you get to figure out what to do next. My Second Life avatar is pretty much my First Life avatar, just cuter, in better shape, and lacking a Y chromosome. She's also more outgoing and more patient than I am. In short, she's as close as I can get to my ideal me.
In Second Life, I have favorite designers, and can recognize their work on sight. In Second Life, I've had my favorite designer ask for my opinion on a new outfit before releasing it. In Second Life, I have an infinite closet with hundreds of outfits, many of which I don't even remember owning until I stumble across them. (In Second Life, I look good in them.)
In Second Life, I can have girl talk. In Second Life, I've had a small army of suitors from all the major genders. (I don't quite know how to get rid of them. This is not a problem I've had to deal with in First Life.)
In Second Life, I can fly. This counts for more than one would expect.
In Second Life, I've been around substantially longer than most residents. I know how the place works. Acting as my Second Life avatar, I have another rarely updated blog and frequently updated Twitter account. In that persona, I hang out elsewhere in the blogosphere, comment in online forums, sometimes work on other Web-based projects... and that just covers things I do outside of Second Life proper. In Second Life... well, to protect my avatar's identity I can't get into detail, but let's just say that I have way too many projects and activities on my agenda. (Which leads to many of them being attended to only sporadically. That much isn't so different from my First Life.)
In Second Life, I can't get seriously hurt. I don't need to eat, or sleep, or do anything else, really. And my rent amounts to about twenty bucks a month. It's almost a wonder I bother with First Life at all.
I wish I had a more compelling argument on the other side, is all.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
7:41 PM: Wait, where are they from?
Shortly after Michael Jackson's passing, I was looking around for covers of his work. There are many. In keeping with Sturgeon's Law, most aren't very good. But then I hit paydirt, the track that made the entire search worthwhile: Texas Lightning's country cover of my favorite MJ song, "Man in the Mirror." This turned out to be one track from an entire album of covers, most of which were country covers of non-country originals.
Any project like that runs the risk of wearing out its welcome. Any given Me First and the Gimme Gimmes cover is fine, but I find that I lose interest after a few tracks. They all run together after awhile. The same goes for Richard Cheese. If you're into covers at all, you can probably think of any number of other examples. When the whole point of the cover is changing the genre for novelty value, the novelty quickly wears off.
But Texas Lightning's Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch...[1] avoids this trap. It's a solid, hugely enjoyable country album, which works as a country album. It just so happens that until they came along, nobody knew that "Like a Virgin," "Dancing Queen," and "Walk on the Wild Side" were country songs. If you hadn't heard the originals, these versions would leave you with no reason to think they'd been in any other genre. The arrangements aren't repetitive, and are never forced. It's inventive, and brilliant, and I really can't praise it enough.
Based on the name, I assumed they were from Texas. The music certainly gave me no reason to assume otherwise. Turns out this isn't the case: they're German. (Born and bred, except the female lead singer, who's from Australia.) In fact, they represented Germany in the 2006 Eurovision song contest with an original song.
I'm now even more impressed than I already was. (Apparently, I'm not alone. According to Wikipedia, they were made honorary citizens of Texas in 2006.)
[Footnote 1: the album was rereleased with additional tracks as Meanwhile, Back at the Golden Ranch... There's also Meanwhile, Back at the Platinum Ranch... with even more tracks, but that seems to be available only on sites of questionable legality.[2])
[Footnote 2: I, of course, got my copy from a site of questionable legality. Were it not for such sites, I wouldn't have known the band existed, as their albums aren't readily available in the States. In fact, I tried to buy the MP3s of their latest album from a mainstream site, but they won't let you do that if you're not in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. I would happily PayPal them ten bucks if there were a way of doing so...]
Sunday, December 13, 2009
1:54 AM: A Tale of Two Fanfics
I recently read two book-length fanfics, both of which were printed by major publishers and billed as the latest installments of the series they were based on. In both cases, they had to overcome the fact that the series in question had very definite endings. One of them is okay, even if it lacks the magic of the original. The other crashed and burned completely.
They are:
Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, by David Benedictus, with decorations by Mark Burgess, a sequel to the Winnie the Pooh books by A.A. Milne.
And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer, a sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams.
(Note: massive spoilers for the original books follow. But only very minor spoilers for the sequels, such as are unavoidable in a book review.)
As mentioned above, both authors had to contend with the end of their respective series. The House at Pooh Corner ends with Christopher Robin outgrowing his stuffed animals; Mostly Harmless ends with the total obliteration of every possible Earth and of our protagonists. In both cases, I would contend, the original ending was satisfying, and undoing it would only weaken the original tale.
In the case of Pooh, one solution might have been to set the new tales during the period covered by the first two books. Instead, Benedictus opts for a stay of execution: the original ending is redefined as Christopher Robin going away to boarding school, but he comes back at the end of the term. Once this is gotten out of the way in the first story, he's free to get on with a collection of new tales.
And they're not bad. I don't think they're quite up to Milne's standard, but few things are. The characters generally behave as we'd expect them to, and the new character, Lottie the Otter, fits organically into the Hundred Acre Wood. This is a respectable effort from somebody who honors the integrity of the original books, and I don't really have any problems with its inclusion in the canon. (To the extent that it is. And the disarming introduction, in which Eeyore predicts that the new writer will get everything wrong, helps in that regard.)
Then there's Colfer's book. I should grant at the outset that there are people who didn't like the final Hitchhiker's book, Mostly Harmless, and especially its ending. Colfer was one of those people. I was not. The avowed mission of this book is to undo the previous one, which is a book I wholeheartedly love. This was never going to be an easy sell. Still, I was willing to put that aside and see where he went from there.
It's a mess. If Adams had written a sixth book in the trilogy before his untimely passing, I think it's safe to say that he would have disposed of the previous ending in a few pages flat, if he'd bothered to address it at all before getting on with the story. (He did just that in book 5, neatly ridding himself of Book 4's baggage by having Fenchurch suddenly disappear.) Colfer doesn't. Colfer spends the entire book writing his way out of the previous ending, except for a few bits meant to set up the sequels. Furthermore, everybody is out of character. Arthur, Trillian, Random, Zaphod, Ford, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, and even the bloody Vogons. None of them act remotely like the versions Douglas Adams wrote.
I'm actually looking for something nice to say about this, but I'm coming up blank. It's not even as if he has a intricate plot set up in which everything dovetails elegantly at the end, like, say, that of Mostly Harmless itself; instead, it lurches along haphazardly, like, say, the first couple of books in the series, just (a) without the charm and wit that carried those, and (b) with the burden of having a specific problem that needed to be solved, which those largely didn't have. And to compound the issue, did I mention the bit where he's clearly angling for sequels?
I suppose the one good thing I can note is that the introduction does characterize this book as a lesser work with poorer production values, which one might like if one liked the original. In keeping with that, if this had to be printed at all -- which I would, of course, contest -- it should have been billed as the first book in a new trilogy of indeterminate length, rather than the "part six of three" proudly proclaimed on the cover. At least set the bad fanfic apart from the real books.
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